Adrian Hon is the Founder and Chief Creative at Six to Start, an online games company; he originally trained as a neuroscientist at Cambridge and Oxford. He takes a strong interest in the controversies surrounding intellectual copyright. Follow Adrian on Twitter at @adrianhon

Google and Facebook are fighting for our lives

At first glance, Facebook’s attempt to plant smear stories about Google appears to have little to do with anyone who doesn’t spend their lives on Facebook or Google. In reality, this Silicon Valley PR war in Palo Alto, California, is about the future of the internet – and the future of a whole lot else.

Since its launch seven years ago, Facebook has grown into a behemoth, with more than 600 million users worldwide. For its fans, Facebook is the fastest and most convenient way of keeping up with who their friends are dating, where they’re working, and what they’re listening to.

Google has been watching Facebook’s rise with barely concealed envy. For many years, Google believed that its highly profitable search engine would always be the primary way in which people discovered new content online; after all, how else would users sort through the billions of websites, videos, and blog posts out there?

Facebook hit upon the perfect alternative; Google’s search engine might be able to pick out relevant websites in a fraction of a second, but Facebook goes a step further by showing you the sites that your friends and acquaintances have recommended. According to the Pew Research Center in a report released this week, Facebook is one of the top sources of visitors to news websites like CNN and The New York Times, often second only to Google. “Google and Facebook are increasingly set up as competitors [for] sorting through the material on the Web,” concludes the report.

Google is desperately worried that it will eventually be sidelined by Facebook’s grip on the social interactions between its users, just as Google itself sidelined Yahoo! in the search engine wars. If more and more people get their news and links from Facebook rather than searching on Google, then its traffic – and revenues – could start declining. Even worse, Google has a terrible track record in building social networking into its offerings.

Larry Page, co-founder and newly appointed CEO of Google, has had enough of the failures. Last month, he declared open war on Facebook by tying every single employee’s bonus to the success of Google’s social strategy. It’s hard to imagine a clearer way to motivate its engineers; and it’s easy to see why Facebook has decided to step up its PR attacks.

But how is this relevant to people who aren’t glued to their computers? Oddly enough, the answer lies in a
new advert from Google. In it, a father emails his daughter with videos and photos of her birth, first words, ballet lessons and lost teeth. It’s a lovely advert that would draw a tear from any parent watching, and of course it shows off a whole array of Google products that will help you do the same thing for your kids.

The message is that Google can help you connect with your family in a way that is far superior to old-fashioned paper letters (and that it is certainly much more relevant to young people). The meaning is that Google wants access to your emails, photos, videos and memories, because then it can advertise to you via those services and keep you on its websites. If this seems like a chilling vision of the future, it’s worth reflecting that Facebook already does this right now.

The battle between Facebook and Google is about who has control of our lives online. And for those who have never lived in a world without the internet, there’s no distinction between online and offline.